We got snow on the Fourth of July--and our most interesting animal sightings!

It had been raining most of the night, so we woke up to a very soggy and cold Fourth of July morning. (Yes, we are now more than a month behind in getting blogs published! Sorry!) The weatherman had been right, and we didn't plan to do much because of the crummy weather. We watched as it continued to rain most of the morning, and then we noticed that the rain had turned to snow! We had never experienced snow falling on Independence Day before!

By noon the skies were beginning to clear. We had high temperatures in the 40s, so this was also the coldest Fourth of July on record for us. While it was too muddy for hiking, we decided that a drive in the mountains would be fun. So we set out in a new direction. Instead of heading east or west, we drove south on Highway 14 to new territory.

Even though it was the middle of the day, the animals were out enjoying the cool temperatures and the clearing skies. After living in the mountains for several days and seeing so many animals, we have learned to start tallying the numbers of each.

This big bull moose was walking through a field of lupines and yellow daisies, with more in the background. In fact, the field behind him was a solid field of purple. What a beautiful place to look for moose!

On our morning drive going south we tallied the following numbers:

Moose - 10 (including this group hanging out in the middle of another field of purple lupines).

It's getting late enough in the summer that the bull moose are beginning to sport some impressive antlers.

One of our moose sightings was right at the pond at the entrance of Bear Lodge Resort Campground.

Elk - Two herds of 78 and 40 that were too far away to take a good picture.

We left the highway to drive one of the gravel forest service roads. Without much traffic, we thought we might see even more wildlife, but instead we found almost none. These narrow dirt roads were flanked by trees. With less open meadows for grazing and less ability for spotters like us to see them, we'll go back to the highway for our wildlife viewing. The only animals we spotted in the forest were:

Marmots - 2

We love finding these curious yellow-bellied marmots, that seem as happy to see us as we are to take pictures of them. While they might scurry away to their hole if we got too close, they can't help but poke their heads up out of that hole to see if we're still watching them.

We continued our challenge to eat five pieces of pie during the five days we were camped at Bear Lodge. We bought a piece of pie around noon, before the holiday tourists cleaned out the pie case. Today's selection was chocolate silk pie, and it might be the sweetest dessert we have ever tasted. We nibbled on it all afternoon because consuming it all at once might put a person into a sugar coma.

We spent some time checking texts and emails, and making phone calls while we were hanging out near the wifi at the lodge. We had an hour-long facetime call with our grandchildren, and another long call with our other son. We also called both of our mothers. Sometimes we need a cold rainy day that limits our exploring so we can catch up on some family communications!

It was still chilly when we drove back to the motor home and caught sight of a bird flying above us through the trees.

It was too colorful to be an eagle or an osprey, but it was bigger than any of the little mountain song birds. When we spotted those colorful wings again, we followed it.

That's when we got to meet some of our campground neighbors. From Lake Havisu, Arizona, they were spending a couple weeks in the mountains of Wyoming in their motor home. Of course they bring their pets with them.

Just like pet dogs needed to be walked, pet parrots need to be exercised. The wire you can see below the red parrot is a tracking device just in case they got confused about where to return when on vacation.

The blue parrot doesn't like to free-fly very much, and the other two were getting tired by the time we discovered them. When the owner held an arm up in take-off position, the parrot just fluffed up his wings. That meant that he was tired and just wanted to go back inside the nice warm motor home.

So we can add to our animal tally today, Parrots - 3!

We have gotten into the routine of taking an evening wildlife drive, and we headed west on Highway 14A at 8:00 p.m. It was 43 degrees, and we wondered if the animals would already be huddled down for the night. But we soon started spotting wildlife. We saw a mother moose and her baby, and we spent some time trying to get a good picture of this pair.

The mother kept her back to us, trying to ignore us.

But it was one of our best shots at seeing a young moose calf.

We saw a total of 15 moose over the next 20 minutes.

We tallied up 18 deer, and 19 miscellaneous elk cows. We also spotted two bull elks--perhaps the same two we saw last night in this area. 

A large herd of female elk, many with new calves, were on the side of the mountain. It's tough to take a picture of a herd of elk in the distance in low light. Sometimes they walked across the ridge of the mountain so we could get elk silhouettes.

We were used to seeing large elk herds here, but this herd was acting strange. Instead of grazing slowly and then bedding down at this time of the evening, we watched as they started running across the face of the mountain in front of us. We had never seen so many elk running before.

We watched the elk in the back of the herd, as they paused and looked backwards. What could be going on?

Then Mark spotted the black bear in the aspen trees on the side of the mountain. That was why the elk herd with all their new baby calves was running this late in the evening! We pulled the pickup further up the highway to keep up with their running progress, and Mark spotted the bear again. This time the black bear was running along the ridge. Mark handed the binoculars to Denisa, and she got to watch him run across the entire ridge. There was no mistaking it was a black bear. The only picture we got was very blurry, as it was getting very dark and it was in the distance. But if you use a little imagination, you will see the back of that black bear that was tormenting the elk herd.

It was a rainy day, but we had a great time on a couple wildlife drives. Fireworks were not allowed in the national forest, so we didn't see any Fourth of July fireworks this year. But it felt like we still had a good Independence Day and some night-time excitement in the mountains this evening. We started out with snow on the Fourth of July, and had our most interesting animal sightings on this holiday!